“Throughout the whole journey, as far as Newcastle, we had a violent storm of snow, rain and sleet; and the cold was more severe than I had felt it before. The coach was not wind-tight at the bottom; and as I was obliged to keep my window open to allow the escape of certain fumes, the produce of whisky, rum, and brandy, I felt the cold so pinching that I should have been glad of fur cap and worsted stockings. To aggravate the evil, I had not a decent companion to converse with. We picked up sundry vagabonds on the road, but there was only one, between Edinburgh and York, who bore the ‘slightest appearance of being a gentleman.’” He, however, we learn was “effeminate and affected.”
In Mozley’s Reminiscences we find a horrid story of the endurance practised by a woman travelling by coach from Edinburgh to London. “I once travelled,” he says, “to London vis-à-vis with a thin, pale, elderly woman, ill-clad in black, who never once got down, or even moved to shake off the snow that settled on her lap and shoulders. I spoke to the guard about her. He said she had come from Edinburgh and had not moved since changing coaches, which she would have to do once; she feared that if she once got down she would not he able to get up again. She had taken no food of any kind.”
There the picture ends, and this tragical figure is lost. Who was she who endured so much? Had she come to London to purchase with her few savings the discharge of an only son who had enlisted in the army? Had she made this awful journey to bid good-bye to a husband condemned to death or transportation? Surely some such story was hers, but we can never know it, and so the gaunt figure, pathetic in its endurance, haunts the memory and the baffled curiosity like an enigma.
Grantham, it is true, has few things more interesting than its inns. This is not the confession of a bon vivant, suspicious though it sounds, but is just another way of stating the baldness of Grantham’s street. One of these few things is the tall steeple of the parish church, which has a fame rivalling that of some cathedrals miles away. Journeying by road or rail, that lofty spire is seen, even while Grantham itself remains undisclosed. If this were a proper place for it much might be said of the church and spire of St. Wulfran’s: how the tower rises to a height of one hundred and forty feet, and the slim crocketed spire to one hundred and forty feet more; being sixth in point of measurement among the famed spires of England. Salisbury is first, with its four hundred and four feet, followed by Norwich, three hundred and fifteen feet, Chichester, and St. Michael’s, Coventry, three hundred feet, and Louth, two hundred and ninety-two feet. But generalities must serve our turn here. If the spire is only sixth in point of measurement it is first in date, being earlier than Salisbury’s. Sir Gilbert Scott held it to be second only to Salisbury in beauty, but Scott’s reputation in matters of taste had slight foundations, and, beautiful though Grantham’s spire is, there are others excelling it. The majesty of Newark’s less lofty spire is greater than this of Grantham, and indeed it may be questioned whether a Decorated spire, comparatively so attenuated and with its purity of outline broken and worried by an endless array of crockets is really more admirable as a thing of beauty, or as a daring and successful exercise in the piling up of fretted stones in so apparently frail a fashion.
We cannot get away from the inns, and even the church is connected with them, the town being annually edified by the so-called “Drunken Sermon” preached at it in the terms of a bequest left in the form of an annual rent-charge of forty shillings on the “Angel” by one Michael Solomon.
But among the popular curiosities of Grantham, few things are more notable than the unpretending inn at Castlegate known variously as the “Beehive” or the “Living Sign.” Immediately in front of the house is a small tree with a beehive fixed in its branches, and a board calling attention to the fact in the lines:
“Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign explore,
And say, when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er,
‘GRANTHAM, now two rareties are thine,
A lofty Steeple and a living Sign.’”
It may fairly be advanced that the suggestion to “explore” an inhabited beehive is an unfortunate choice of a word.
There is (unless it has lately been abolished) another curiosity at Grantham. It is a custom. When the time-expired Mayor vacates his office, what has aptly been called a “striking” ceremony takes place. His robe is stripped off, his chain is removed from his shoulders, and with a small wooden hammer the Town Clerk takes the ex-Chief Magistrate on the head to typify the end of his authority. There is only one possible method more derogatory than this humiliating treatment, but it need not be specified.